Raindance

Related EAI Public Programs

Gallery at BRIC House
647 Fulton Street
Brooklyn, NY 11217

EAI is pleased to partner with BRIC on the exhibition Public Access/Open Networks, on view from March 23, 2017 through May 7, 2017. Curated by: Jenny Gerow, Assistant Curator at BRIC, in collaboration with freelance curators Reya Sehgal and Lakshmi Padmanabhan

Public Access/Open Networks showcases both historic and contemporary art works inspired by and produced for Public Access television. The exhibition features over twenty artists and collectives that have worked in the Public Access arena, as well as contemporary artists experimenting with the democratic potential of new media platforms on the Internet. As part of the exhibition, BRIC’s own Public Access television channels will also air continuously in the gallery space, and a stage in the center of the gallery will act as a set for the production of new programming by BRIC’s community producers.

In conjunction with the exhibition, EAI and BRIC will co-present the symposium Utopian Potentials and Media(ted) Realities on April 22, 2017 from 12-4pm.

As part of EAI's ongoing 45th anniversary celebrations, we launched a series of screenings that highlight a less well-known but historically important and creatively fertile area of our programs: EAI's Editing Facility for artists. Established in 1972 with early 1/2" open reel editing equipment, EAI's facility was one of the first such post-production workspaces for artists in the U.S. Over five decades, an extraordinary group of artists has used EAI's facility to create some of the most significant works in media art's diverse histories. Many of these artists and works will be featured in screenings throughout our 45th anniversary year.

The first screening on April 27, "Edited at EAI": 1972-77 featured an eclectic selection of works from the 1970s, charted the alternative artistic, political, and cultural expressions of artists experimenting with emergent video editing technologies and strategies. The program included early works from the 1970s by Ant Farm, Juan Downey, Jean Dupuy, Shigeko Kubota, Mary Lucier, Raindance, Anthony Ramos, Ira Schneider, and Hannah Wilke, among others.

On June 16 Artist to Artist featured the rich collaborative process and the creative relationships between artists and the artists/editors with whom they worked, through the lens of EAI's editing facility. Video works by Cheryl Donegan, Ursula Hodel, Nam June Paik, Carolee Schneemann, and Michael Smithall edited at EAIwere shown together with works by Robert Beck, Seth Price and Trevor Shimizu, three internationally recognized artists who spent formative years as EAI editors. Artists Robert Buck and Cheryl Donegan were in conversation following the screening.

On June 22 EAI celebrated the video work of Tom Rubnitz (1956-1992), whose deliriously camp genre parodies and music videos capture the anarchic spirit and talents of the 1980s East Village scene of Club 57 and the Pyramid Club. The rich body of work that Rubnitz edited at EAI includes TV spoofs, music videos, and the musical parody Psykho III The Musical (1985). Artist John Kelly participated in a conversation following the screening.

On July 27 Restless Generation focused on a group of conceptually driven performance videos by women artists who reenergized and redefined the genre in the 1990s, as seen through the lens of EAI's editing facility. These lo-fi performances staged for the camera­by artists such as Vanessa Beecroft, Alix Lambert, Kirsten Mosher, Alix Pearlstein, and Beverly Semmes, among othersevoke the strategies of the first generation of artists working with video in the early 1970s, even as their bold stylizations, ironic sensibility, and explicit nods to consumer culture announced a fresh approach to representations of female identity and the body that spoke emphatically to its time.

On August 16 the series continued with an evening of activist video work from the late 1980s through the mid-1990s. Shot largely on low-end consumer equipment and edited, often off-hours, at EAI, these works use video as an activist tool, confronting urgent issues around the AIDS crisis, race, gender, and sexuality. Videos by ACT UP affinity groups DIVA TV (Damned Interfering Video Activist Television) and House of Color, as well as art collective X-PRZ, were screened along with work by artists Robert Beck and Tom Kalin. Although rooted in the specific political and cultural contexts of that moment, these powerful activist voices

Wednesday, April 27, 2016
Noon - 8pm

As part of EAI's ongoing 45th anniversary celebrations, we launched a series of screenings that highlight an under-recognized but historically important and creatively fertile area of our programs: EAI's Editing Facility for artists. Established in 1972 with early 1/2" open reel editing equipment, EAI's facility was one of the first such post-production workspaces for artists in the U.S. Over five decades, an extraordinary group of artists has used EAI's facility to create some of the most significant works in media art's diverse histories. The first screening, which featured an eclectic selection of works from the 1970s, charted the alternative artistic, political, and cultural expressions of artists experimenting with emergent video editing technologies and strategies.

Taking the year of EAI's founding as its point of departure, the exhibition set in dialogue a series of diverse works created in and around 1971, which are linked by alternative artistic and activist impulses. Circa 1971 exposed the generative encounters among these artists and influences and initiates unexpected correspondences between seemingly disparate works.

Anthology Film Archives 32 Second Avenue, New York City

Thursday, May 24, 2007, 8:00 pm

This was the first program in ALL CIRCUITS ON, a series produced in collaboration with Anthology Film Archives. Exploring both institutions' archives, the series presents rarely-screened works from the early days of video art. The first program looked at early artists' experiments with television. Works in the program examined at how television and video work, presented new ways of critiquing the medium, and proposed new uses for the technology. Viewers learned how video can be used as a tool, for the freeing of information and the creation of a healthy media ecology.

Museum of Modern Art New York City

February 26 - April 30, 2002

As the keystone of EAI's 30th anniversary events, Museum of Modern Art presented First Decade: Video from the EAI Archives, a major retrospective that looked at the early days of video through EAI's historical collection. Featuring 60 works, the twelve-part program explored themes and issues ranging from performance and the body; narrative; cultural essays; activism, and poetics.